The Vision and History of Notes and Domino

“As you might expect of such complex and successful software, Lotus Notes and Domino share a long and rich history. In some respects, this history mirrors the evolution of the computing industry itself-the development and widespread adoption of PCs, networks, graphical user interfaces, communication and collaboration software, and the Web. Notes and Domino have been there nearly every step of the way, influencing (and being influenced by) all these critical developments. This article briefly retraces the history of Notes and Domino, starting with the earliest conceptual and development stages and continuing through major feature releases.”

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Before there was the internet and intranet as we know it today there was a need for a place where users could fill out forms for other departments and there was a need for simple applications that would fulfill requests and store information in simple databases and various things of that sort. At the time Notes was just as good of a solution, if not a better one, to this problem as a web browser client integrated with a database backend but this is no longer the case.

I work for a company that used to use Lotus Notes for all kinds of forms and databases and things. Most employee workspaces are littered with these old and non-used such things. Over the years all of these things have been supplanted by browser-based solutions that are easier to manage and deploy for IT and generally easier for the users too.

Companies don’t want everything and the kitchen sink out of their messenging and groupware product anymore. It isn’t a database or an application development platform and it isn’t a web browser. They want it to do three things and to do those three things well – send, receive and store email, maintain a directory of all of the users and have good personal and departmental caldendaring. Microsoft Outlook/Exchange does just those things and it does it well. It has a clear product roadmap and clear pricing and it, frankly, works better, is less resource intensive and more seemles on both the client and the server. Subjectively, I find that most office workers tend to prefer Outlook to the Notes client hands-down and it integrates with MS Office which they all are using and familiar with. That is why Notes is hemoraging customers and, having to support it day in and day out, I wish that we were one of the next to go…

I know a lot of Domino developers swear by it as a collaborative application development environment, and it probably is decent although me thinks it may be turning a bit archaic in a world of LAMP, J2EE etc.

But it is absolutely awful for email. I hate it. I have been stuck using this stupid application for corporate email for five years and it is nothing but punishment for what I can only assume are sins committed in a previous life. ccMail 10 years ago was miles ahead of where Notes is today in terms of useability and functionality.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that one of the major improvements with 6.5, which we mercifully upgraded to last year, is that it does not crash as much. But wait, there’s more! When it crashes now, you no longer have to reboot your system before you can relaunch the application. Yes, that is correct. Prior to 6.x, if Notes crashed you were SOL, due to processes still running in memory Notes would actually not permit you to relaunch until a reboot. And I’m not talking about running it under Win3.1 with 4MB of RAM, this is on modern XP systems with 512MB. Reboot!

Of course, one of the IBM devs was kind enough to release a small (naturally unsupported) app called ZapNotes that millions of suffering Notes users around the world downloaded so that they could use it to kill Notes processes still kicking around memory, fooling Notes into thinking you had rebooted, and gracefully permitting you to launch it.

So there you have it, the application was so hairy that an IBM dev unofficially created a program to wipe it out of memory when it crashed so you could relaunch it and then clean it out again the next time it crashed. The fact that this was clearly such a widespread problem that a helper utility was created to deal with it (last time I used ZapNotes I think it was up to v3.0) should have been a clear sign that something needed a serious rethink on the old engineering side.

It is slow. It is un-intuitive. It is clunky. It’s implementation of HTML standards is haphazard at best. You can send yourself an HTML email using Notes and it will not render properly in Notes when you view it. I won’t even tell you what it does to emails sent to you by an Outlook user.

It takes anywhere from 30-60 seconds to launch. It gobbles up memory. And when it’s chugging it will drag your system with it.

The one saving grace for usability is that it does a damn good job of indexing my 3GB email file. I haven’t archived my emails in 4 years. I don’t delete anything. I barely even use folders. My mail file has over 100,000 documents in it. But with the indexed search I can easily find any email I am looking for with a reasonably simple search, even if those search terms are contained in attachments. And it is blazingly fast at searching. It’s basically had google desktop search capabilities since before google existed. And I guess the fact that it can deal with a mail file that size is a testament to it’s back-end server robustness.

But I still hate it.

And the biggest kick in the ass? You’d think if there was one single company that would provide a linux desktop version of their groupware client (besides Novell, who’s Groupwise solution lacks even Notes/Domino’s sub-par useability) it would be IBM, the “linux” company.

But alas, no. IBM won’t provide a client for linux. Why? Because the existing one mostly works under Wine. They even provide detailed steps for the hacks you need to get it working. That’s their linux solution. Or, use Domino Web Access, where you get to access your email in a horrific web interface that would look right at home in Navigator 1.0. (Of course, if you’re running IE then you can use iNotes, which is actually a pretty rich web-based email solution).

Crikey, I hate Notes. I thought I had found a solution with Microsoft’s Outlook Connector for Domino, which on the surface was pretty cool. It allowed me to use Outlook with Domino, including calendar et al., and I could actually read emails from people using Outlook. Worked great, except for the part where it actually started corrupting my emails stored on the server. Yes, the actual emails. I now have old emails that I can no longer open because they were modified and consist of winmail.dat attachments now. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

complex and successfull, bloated crap more like it. Is the site working for IBM. Or are you trying to make osnews like slashdot. IBM are a bunch of lying wankers. Look at the new AIX deal. Lying “choose expletive” (my favourite starts with c, end with t and has a vowel in there).

If IBM are so pro opensource when will the opensource Notes. And DB2, websphere, there jvm implementation, mainframe OSes, AIX and all their other projects. Hold on, would that hit there services revenue?

IBM supports OpenSource as long as it is suitable to its business and enterprise plan.

Example: they use Eclipse in order to boost the development of their own Rational Rose apps (or known as Websphere Studio which is based on Eclipse). And in order to push more people to feel comfort with their IDE and if you feel comfort with it than if you are in big company, there are big possibility that your boss decides to base its technology on IBM’s and get the Rational Rose package which costs some thousand US$ for a license.

IBM won’t ever opensource DB2 (there is an express edition which is free but not opensource).

IBM won’t ever opensource AIX.

IBM won’t ever opensource Notes.

Because all of it are their core business. And their core business is enterprise world.

It is not a normal relational database. It is for an unstructured data. It is very good for knowledgede management system. And the best one is: you can develop complex database and workflow application very fast. I could make a prototype (80% of functionalities) of complex collaboration app under Notes just in 4 days, where under J2EE it would take months. That means in 1 or 2 months the final version can be out and the productivity is there. And it is still flexible, as you know the business world is very dynamic. Meanwhile the app under J2EE takes at least 6 months till 1 year or more and perhaps there are some different requirements. And yes, you can develop J2EE app and use relational database with Notes.

Yes it costs some. But if you can utilise its capability (not just email/calendar) than the ROI would be very quick and bring profit to your company.

I have administered several domino servers under Windows and Linux, it’s ok for many things (very robust, it’s “virtually” impossible to lose things, but… the client is really bad. Under Windows it’s usable. Under OS X really sucks. The Email is just a Service, “another” service in a myriad of Notes/Domino services, therefore it lacks common stuff that MS Outlook had for years. If you use Domino for email, you’re wasting money.